Giles Goddard on Nintendo’s corporate culture in the 90s, making Mario’s stretchy face in Mario 64, more
Giles Goddard is one of the very few non-Japanese people who have worked at Nintendo’s Japanese headquarter. He’s probably most famous for working on games like Star Fox and Stunt Race FX with fellow Brit Dylan Cuthbert with their company Argonaut Software. Eurogamer just published an interview with Goddard on what it was like working for and at Nintendo in the 90s. Make sure to read the full interview here; below are a couple of interesting excerpts:
On Nintendo’s corporate culture at the time:
It was very 80s Japanese. Do a YouTube search for 80s Japanese company, they’d have all been like that – there are so many documentaries about the boom period of Japan, the 80s, where they’re all copying the US, make it Japanese then make it better and resell it to the world, and they were really good about it. They were really cocky, everyone’s being paid really well, but they couldn’t figure out the culture. The culture was still basically old-school – it’s like being in a school, or the army. You come in at 8.30am, you have a bell at 8.45am to tell you to start working. Everything’s regimented. You work your arse off and go home at 11pm at night, then go home and sleep a few hours. And we refused to do that. At the end of Star Fox, when we were working really stupid hours, we thought we were being taken advantage of. We didn’t see the bigger picture, that we’re 19-year-old kids working with Miyamoto.
On working with Satoru Iwata when development on the N64 started:
At that point Iwata was just a programmer at HAL. And I thought he was a bit of a nerd. I remember him complaining that SGI had just got a big contract with SKG – everyone was partying the day we got there, there was a big barbecue outside, and Iwata said we’ve just got here, why is everyone partying. I thought, just chill out a bit! And then a few years later he became president, the next time I interacted with him it was almost like he had a script he was reading from. But at heart he was a programmer – I knew he had the right mentality to run Nintendo. He knew how to develop games. But other than that he was a bit nerdy.
On making Mario’s stretchy face at the start of Super Mario 64:
When we got the Indys, they came with a camera. I put ping pong balls on my face and I thought it’d be cool to use the camera to control the face. And the justification was to test out the skinning – at that point, if you had two joints they’d be two separate objects. There was no smoothing. That’s what I was experimenting in – how to do skinning. And a good demonstration of that was the Mario face. If you have a boss there that’s seen this iteration of skinning, of facial animation – it’s dicking around with a purpose, it’s progressive and it’s new stuff.
